A soul by any other name...

According to Plato, the soul is split into three parts.

1.  Animal:  This is your basic survival guide.  Not only does this bit of soul drive you to find enough to eat and drink, find shelter, and find a mate, but is also responsible for the appreciation of wealth and (physical) beauty.  When the soul is weighted toward this part, the person is likely to be someone who loves (perhaps a bit too much) food, drink, sex, money, and other sorts of fun stuff.  The animal part of the soul was the least developed, the farthest away from perfection.  In Plato's Republic, merchants were considered to be the lowest ranking class of his imaginary utopia.  They were also the only ones allowed private property, as their greed served the city's economy.

2.  Courage:  The Greeks had a thing for courage.  It went so far that Homer himself, the ultimate Greek, penned a heroic epic that, in between the gore-fest, quietly asked listeners/readers if this hero stuff wasn't maybe more trouble than it was worth.  For modern Americans, courage is seen as the ability to operate despite fear; we love our soldiers and our heroes, but we'd probably be shocked at the Greek version.  Our heroes tend to be outwardly humble; not so characters like Achilles.  Heroism was intimately tied up with the driving need to be famous for one's deeds.  In Plato's imaginary city, soldiers were the second class of citizens.  Their need to be recognized for their valor served the city's need for protection.

3.  Wisdom:  Naturally, a philosopher thinks other philosophers are the cream of the crop.  No doubt if potters wrote dissertations on government, they would want the pottery guild running things.  Wisdom, of course, is the need for knowledge.  True happiness--and true virtue--are tied up in knowing the reality of the world.  (Just look at physicists' unending search for the unified field theory!)  Wisdom is the "ruling principle" of the soul; in a well-balanced soul, it keeps the other two parts under control.  If you are wise, your appetites can't control you; likewise, a wise person understands the better part of valor.  In Plato's dream world, philosophers were the top dogs.  (He had very strict ideas about what the ruling class could or could not do, however.  Philosopher kings would be forbidden to marry or own property!)

In Plato's view, this tripartite soul was the explanation for the many different sorts of people in the world.  Most of us, with our consumer society and obsession with fame, he would probably consider terribly out of balance.  And the idea of a government run only by those specially selected for their personality type, who by their very natures would not enjoy rulership, is briefly tempting.  But even Plato acknowledged that his utopia was not completely realistic.

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Another picture of the soul is brought to us by the Stoics--among them Marcus Aurelius (yes, the old emperor from Gladiator), an actual philosopher king.

The Stoics specifically stated that the soul is a unified whole.  There is no difference between appetite, courage, and reason.  (There was not even a substantive difference between the individual soul and the "pneuma" or cosmic soul.)  In fact, the choice to, say, binge on a pack of Oreos is itself an act of reason.  The difference between a wise person and a "slave" (i.e., someone who never gives things a second thought) is the ability to understand this.  When we mindlessly (so to speak) munch on cookies, we are "assenting" to a choice or impression (that eating cookies is a good thing).  This assent is what makes each choice we make--consciously or unconsciously--an act of reason.

There would probably be no Stoics doing Nutri System.

The trick here is that even opinions and feelings can be assented to.  Marcus "the Golden" reminded himself frequently in his Meditations that the idea that other people drank too much is an opinion that he assented to far too often.  He repeatedly chastised himself that he could not change other people, only his opinions about them--and that he himself was no better than they.

This idea of being able to change only the self, and nothing else, is a very important part of Stoic theory.  They were determinists, but not fatalists.  It's a hair-thin difference, but it's there.

Fatalism is the idea that everything that happens has been "fated" to happen since the beginning of time.  If I trip on my shoelace tomorrow, I was always going to trip on my shoelace, even if shoelaces weren't invented yet.  Think predestination.

Determinism is a sort of materialism that says that everything that happens, happens because events from the beginning of time played out that way.  Sort of a cosmic domino effect.  If the Big Bang had resulted in one less hydrogen atom, the universe as we know it might have been very different.  Action and reaction, motion and rest.  But we are conscious things: we can't change what the gods will do, but we can change how we react to it.

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Oddly enough, Plato the ultimate theist maybe winds up being the one with a lower opinion of humanity.  Your destiny and choices in life depend on what kind of soul you were born with.  (We might say that our DNA determines our personality.)

But the deterministic Stoics, who denied a substantive difference between nature and the divine, had more faith in the human spirit.  They demanded much more out of their own character, but had high hopes that they could achieve a sort of existential freedom. 

Both these theories wound up influencing Spinoza in some way.  Plato's theories were recast in Neoplatonism as put together by Plotinus.  More on him in another post, as he'll take quite a bit of explaining.

The Stoics were, of course, pantheists similar to Spinoza, and he agreed with their system of limited determinism and the personal ethics that went along with it.

Other philosophical relations to the Stoics include Jean-Paul Sartre (who took the Stoic idea of assenting to a whole new level), and Lao Tzu (whose Tao te Ching eerily mirrors the Meditations in its philosophy and subject matter).